Tag: Cornelia Walker Bailey

Once you’ve taken a left turn at Landing Road from Highway 99 southbound, roll down your car windows. As you drive east toward the Sapelo Island Visitors Center near Darien, you’ll pass beneath arching oak branches draped in long, lingering Spanish moss, and you’ll begin to notice a different kind of breeze—the rare sort of air that fills lungs with wistful history. But a fog of encroachment is making the future murky for the island’s Hog Hammock community.

Cornelia Walker Bailey knew Sapelo Island’s history and was determined to get it straight. As the unofficial griot (a West African term for a historian or storyteller) of Hog Hammock, the last remaining of the original African American communities founded by the island’s population of freed slaves and their descendants, she taught it every chance she got.